Chroma ROM Review – Lightweight Companion to Nexus 6P

I am a regular ROM flasher, or what people call “a flashaholic”, and I like to switch ROMs every now and then, testing their stability and features. Starting off from my first Android smartphone – LG Optimus One, I have wandered between some popular ROMs, like CyanogenMod, MIUI, AOKP, ParanoidAndroid, but never did care about others. The other ROMs felt somewhat useless to me, because they only cheery-picked handful of features from several known ROMs, and baked them into a single package. I never even cared to flash them even once, but that was definitely unfair. This approach of mine took a turn recently, when my favorite ROM for the Nexus 6P & Nexus 5 – Cataclysm ROM, was discontinued. I am not that fond of CM or MIUI, so I had nowhere else to go, except for the Android Development section of my Nexus 6P at XDA-Developers forum.

I started off with the top-rated ROMs available there, and then I came across this fantastic ROM, known as Chroma ROM. The first thing that pulled me towards it, was its lightweight nature. So, I decided to go on and flash Chroma ROM on my Nexus 6P. What happened next? I won’t just put it in few words, I will share my experience with this very ROM and its features.

So today, I am going to write down a full Chroma ROM Review, in which I will outline all the major features and performance experience, so that our readers could also know about Chroma ROM.

Chroma ROM Review

If you would have asked me, I would say, there are two types of custom ROMs, first – those which work on enhancing the native abilities of Android, second – those which concentrate on beautifying the user-interface. But then, here comes a third type of custom ROM that I just have known, which offers nothing but pure stability and only a handful of useful features, and also a fair bunch of UI customization options.

Chroma ROM (developer – zephiK) is something that I would tag under the third category, and its stability and performance has forced me to write down this review. Okay, so no more discussions, lets head towards the ROM.

Booting the ROM for the first time didn’t took much long, a decent duration of a minute at most and it entered the OS. The foremost thing that I loved, was the boot animation – neatly design and pretty simple, suiting the ROM’s approach.

This is something that every user looks for in the first place, so that he/she can distinguish the ROM from the others. Chroma is not bloated with tons of options to customize your Android, and is only limited to the basic ones that may get you through. This is something I have always preferred, and was the major reason for me using Cataclysm ROM, earlier. The options are directly embedded into Settings and could be accessed by going to Settings > Chroma.

Status and Navigation bar

You have options to customize battery icons and enable battery percentage. You can enable Brightness control on status bar and Notification count.

Quick pulldown options are available to instantly open Quick Settings by swiping down from the chosen screen edge. Enable network traffic stats and adjust the icons to be shown on the status bar. Customize Quick Settings toggles and its appearance.

Change the layout or add buttons to the nav-bar, Adjust navigation bar dimensions, kill app back button, Clear all button. You can also change the location of the Clear all button.

Gestures & Lockscreen

Chrome ROM also inscribes gestures on status bar and nav-bar. You can enable double-tap on status bar to put the device to sleep, double-tap the navigation bar to put the device to sleep, double-tap anywhere to put the device to sleep, and also three finger swipe downwards to take screenshot.

On the lockscreen, you can customize the carrier label – enable carrier label at lockscreen or status bar, or both. You can set lockscreen shortcuts and also custom wallpapers.

Power menu & Volume rocker

Volume rocker setting is basically concerned with the volume buttons and their actions. You can enable Volume rocker wake to wake the device from sleep on lockscreen. Also, controls to long-press volume buttons to change tracks and media control options. Another, you can also swap the volume keys upon rotation.

While that was the Chroma settings, but the ROM also has included several other settings like the following:

Display > Theme– You can change the Settings theme between Light and Dark.

SuperSU – The ROM is pre-rooted by Chainfire’s SuperSU, and doesn’t require you to flash any root package on top.

Chroma also includes another great feature – RRO Layers support, which lets you theme your complete Android framework using Layers Manager app.

Chroma ROM Features

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SuperSU (Left) & About Phone (Right)

Notification Lights (Left) & Battery Lights (Right)

Rotation (Left) & Theme (Right)

Above, we have mentioned almost all the features that Chroma ROM offers. But apart from features, the ROM mainly concentrates on stability and performance. Scrolling and multitasking is swift and snappy, so no matter what amount of apps you open in the background, you won’t get a single glitch while moving between different app windows. Its been a few weeks now that I have had Chroma ROM installed on my Nexus 6P. And, I must say, it is positively is the most stable, close-to-stock, and well performing ROM.

I do not lay my interest in benchmark scores because they are highly subjective, but I am also aware of other users and their belief. So, here is the AnTuTu benchmark score for your reference. The score is slightly higher (86891) than that with Stock Factory Image (83989), majorly in terms of CPU.

GApps and installation instructions could be found on the original XDA thread. The provided GApps are from BankS and contains the apps for basic Google functionality, if you want, you can download other GApps from opengapps.org.

You must try Chroma ROM on your supported Nexus smartphone, if you are seeking stability and battery life. Tell us how you feel using the ROM, via comments?

Dhananjay (DJ) is an Android devotee and a Tech Blogger by profession. He is a keen undergraduate, seeking and working hard on his ambitions to achieve something distinctive in his life. He prefers interacting with his readers in the most reproaching manner possible and his desires here are not just to reach out the tech figures, but also attract those non-interested minds to our Android universe. He proudly owns Nexus 6P, Nexus 5, OnePlus One and a Nexus 4.

Thank you very much for the suggestion Yousuf. We were planning on doing a “Best Custom ROMs” series and will see to it that Mokee makes it up to the list. If you have any other ROM suggestions, kindly let us know. Also don’t forget to tell us how that specific ROM is different from the others.

Chathura Madushan

Hi, I am using a Nexus 6p. After the nougat update I got the “No Service” message and now I am not getting any cellular signals. There are posts in nexus help forums but they still don’t have a proper solutions yet(There are so many people having this same issue). I think this could be caused by selecting a different radio band(while nougat update). So I think to flash chroma and then select the Automatic radio band (because automatic is not available in current radio band list). My question is after flashing chroma rom, can I flash a factory image again? (Current image is 7.1.1) . If this is a fixed solution it will be helpful to other affected people as well.

As for the problem, I am suffering too. I myself have stock 7.1.1 installed. I couldn’t get any 3G or LTE signals. Only 2G works. Tried moving back ONLY the radio to 7.0 and 6.0, but no success. I believe it is related to the software/ROM itself. You could try moving back to 7.0 or flash a 7.0 based custom ROM (I prefer PureNexus ROM). See if that fixes your issue.

Also, make a note that while flashing back and forth between 7.0, 7.1, and 6.0, make sure to flash the corresponding vendor file or you may end up in a bootloop.

Chathura Madushan

thanks for the quick reply. But I flashed back to 6 and it won’t help.

I thought to change the radio band by flashing chroma and then flash factory image(7.1.1) back. The problem caused on 7. So if I flash directly 7.1.1 it might not get affected. So I can use it as it was before. Have you tried this approach?

Do you get cellular signals after flashing chroma??

Now I know how to flash factory images as bcause I have flashed so many images to solve this issue. But rooting / flashing custom rom like chroma is totally new to me. Do you have a well explained guide to do this?

The thing is I prefer to use factory image rather than custom roms. Any guidance/help would be really appreciated. Thanks.

Why I am specifically asking to follow this tutorial? Because it will wipe off your complete device including storage, and help you roll back your device to its stock state. Other tutorials tend not to erase the userdata partition/internal storage. But a full wipe has always helped me clear off several issues from my device.